Kind of ironic, considering how much we pay in taxes now...
What people in the US pay in taxes isn't even remotely close to what people in Europe pay, even(especially?) for the well-off. Their governments have had a lot more time/history to figure out new & creative ways to relieve their citizens of their money. US taxpayers just whine a lot more about it.
On the other hand, the average European citizen seems to be a little more content about the services that their governments provide for that money. Would US taxpayers whine so much if they thought they were getting decent value for their money (didn't see so much government waste)? Or are they really short sighted enough so that they're willing to let large chunks of society collapse to reduce their own personal taxes a little?
Actually, in the situation where you have a little tiny company going up against a really huge one (and the really tiny company has a reasonable sounding case), then I would think that getting a jury might be more preferable, since they might be more swayable by emotion than an apathetic judge.
If you're in a community broadcasting at a tenth of a watt several bands away from anyone who might be inconvenienced then shutting you down is gonna be way low on the priority list.
"Inconvenienced" includes those larger radio stations who might think that you are taking away listeners from them (especially if they're feeling a little defensive about the quality of their programming).
I always wondered if it were possible to share people's browser cache contents via P2P technology (with exceptions for the secure documents, of course).
I guess the big problem is still with the indexing.
One of the old stories at Caltech in Pasadena, CA was about how they made a two-story tall acetylene orange launcher (since oranges from the trees on campus were more plentiful than potatoes).
Somebody went over to a local community college (a mile or so away from the Caltech campus), and drew a big X on the ground. Every day at about the same time, an orange would fall out of the sky and hit (approximately) the X.
The students at the community college eventually figured out what was going on when they caught a Techer with a walkie-talkie giving the shooters reports.
I use one of those huge rubber exercise therapy balls for a chair.
It keeps me moving around, makes me stay awake even if I'm short on sleep (if I don't, I end up on the floor), is really easy to shift into a situp position or for stretching my back for a few seconds, and makes for a good laugh (at me, not with me:) for visitors to our cubicle farm...
The main disadvantage is that I can't really wear shorts sitting on this thing, since my exposed skin sticks to the rubber...
Here in the UK, there is a law saying you must provide your decrytion keys/passwords to the relevant authorites when asked. And it's illegal to tell anyone. It's not illegal to say you haven't been asked yet, so I am OK. For now.
It sure is hard to remember those pesky passphrases, especially under the pressure of government interrogation. Say, did your government ever arrest the Minister of Information (or whatever the correct title was) for that encrypted e-mail message he was sent containing evidence of a crime?
by which he means ``the media always consults experts some people consider liberal on issues like homelessnee''
Actually, I would see that translation as an indication that you are the type of person who will twist anything that a media person says into an indication of bias.
Put more simply, there are two sides to the homelessness issue: one side insists the answer is to pump more government money into helping homeless people,
Conservative code for wasting money on poor people
the other side insists the answer is to take the governments foot a little off the neck of buisiness (their mental imagery) and let buisinesses create jobs.
Conservative code for "trickle-down" economics
I'd agree with you that most government programs are a waste of money, but not because they're giving money to poor people - but because they're wasting money that they're supposed to be giving to poor people.
I would also agree that just giving money to poor people is probably a bad way of distributing that money. But that money _should_ be spent _for_ the poor people in such a way to help them bootstrap themselves out of poverty, perhaps through education/training, and/or perhaps through arranging that they can become hired for a decent job.
Helping business isn't necessarily a bad idea - if those efforts are directed at real small businesses, which collectively contribute a helluva lot more "oomph" to the economy than the multinationals, and help people more directly near the poor end of society. Most of the proposals I see out of the Republicans involve giving lots of money to people who are already well-off though. (OTOH, I see a complete lack of proposals from the Democrats, with only lip service for poor people.)
I like to think of this as "trickle-up" economics, where everybody in society gets a chance (but not a guarantee) to make it to a higher standard of living, unlike giving lots of money to the rich, allowing them to sock even more money away & hoping that enough crumbs reach society's floor for a few poor bastards to claw their way out of despair (and to keep the bulk of the population too busy struggling for survival to bug the people in power).
but you are hurting the copyright owners...you're stealing from them.
No you're not. The copyright owners haven't lost anything that they already had. They've only lost a "chance" to get money, a chance which exists _only_ because of legislation, not because of any true concept of providing a good or service. In a true free market, they would've never gotten that extra money in the first place. Any normal business owner which complained about "losing" money because everybody wasn't giving them money after that business had performed a service for one person sometime in the past, would be laughed out of court.
But the fact that 60 million people are on Kaaza, and most of them have the intention of downloading copyrighted works without compensating the folks who made them- there's gotta be some "hurt" going on there.
No, there isn't (except in some people's minds).
Anytime you refuse to compensate somebody for services rendered, somebody's losing money.
Incorrect. If this were a true market, then content creators would be paid for whatever good they created or service rendered - _at the time that the good was provided or the service rendered_. There is no particular moral obligation for me (or anyone else) to pay them _every time_ that particular piece of content changes hands, since they have already been paid when they created the work & handed it over to the first buyer.
"Copyright", and other forms of intellectual "property", are highly artificial market concepts. We (society) allowed them to come into being in the hopes that they would encourage more content production for public usage, _not_ to enrich particular individuals or corporate entities. (I sincerely doubt that these concepts would have made it into the Constitution if the founders thought that intellectual "property" was only good for enriching individuals/corporate entities.)
If we (society) can see that that these concepts are not achieving the results that we wanted (producing large amounts of high-quality content for public usage), then we shouldn't be supporting these concepts.
Just because everybody else does it does not mean it's right.
Similarly, just because the law says that it's illegal doesn't mean it's wrong. Everybody has to make their own decisions about morality, even if that decision is to blindly follow what other people tell them is moral.
Most people are willing to accept that if you don't hurt somebody else by your actions, then there's nothing wrong with your actions.
Actually, quantum computers can break most of the commonly-used public-key algorithms (asymmetric), but it only helps out some on the commonly-used symmetric-key protocols (if they aren't breakable by anything except for brute force). So, 256-bit encryptions using Twofish/AES/Rijndael/3DES(although 3DES probably wants more bits) are still probably safe for the universal age even with quantum computers.
I don't care so much about roads, but for "equal opportunity" to mean _anything_, good schools need to be available for everyone - not just the people who can afford it. Without a widely-available societal mechanism to allow people to haul themselves out of the gutter, you're going to end up with a society that has a frozen class structure with massive inequity.
I dunno about using TV tuner cards, which have been a real pain-in-the-butt when I had to deal with them, but I did find it easy to hook up my DV-camcorder to my PC through a Firewire (IEEE 1394) card & then essentially save the video stream from the camcorder directly onto my harddisk. The camcorder would also automatically send any analog video source I hooked up to its video inputs straight to the Firewire connection, real-time.
The camcorder provides the video stream in MJPEG format (which would probably need to be reencoded to something a little more standard, but that could be done at leisure and perhaps other machines).
If you've got a powerful-enough PC, it should be able to handle a couple of simultaneous Firewire streams. There's probably some way to do the video/audio->Firewire conversion w/o a camcorder too. There might also be video/audio->USB converters (as long as your USB connections have a high enough bandwidth to handle a decent quality stream).
Did you know that you can string a long wire parallel to the power lines and steal power from the electric company via electrical induction?
What's interesting, is that I've heard that if you draw too much energy, the electric company will detect the drop in voltage & come out to see what's wrong (then have criminal charges brought against you).
Or maybe it's funny how innovative ideas stem from products that are heavily patented and protected. Hence how capitalism works.
That's not capitalism. Capitalism involves payment for goods and/or services. Patents (and other forms of intellectual "property") require state enforcement to create artificial scarcity.
You can argue about whether or not intellectual property is good for society, but you can't call it "pure" capitalism.
However a terrorist is a legal military target, and an appartment is a legal military target. A terrorist inside an appartment is a legal military target.
Convenient. Just define all members of your enemy population as terrorists (or at least potential terrorists), then bomb away, without worrying about the innocents because they were being used by the "terrorists" as shields.
Lasers are very problematic because they are scattered by fog, mist, smoke, and dust.
That's just 'cause the lasers weren't strong enough to vaporize anything that got in its way. Of course, if they were that strong, you wouldn't need the bombs...
hat is why we have The Library of Congress [loc.gov].
No one institution, no matter how large, is going to be able to archive the sum of human endeavor. Just by lack of time/researchers/resources/shelf space/restoration/etc, they are going to have to make decisions about what works they are going to include/exclude in their archive.
Slashdot Mirror
What people in the US pay in taxes isn't even remotely close to what people in Europe pay, even(especially?) for the well-off. Their governments have had a lot more time/history to figure out new & creative ways to relieve their citizens of their money. US taxpayers just whine a lot more about it.
On the other hand, the average European citizen seems to be a little more content about the services that their governments provide for that money. Would US taxpayers whine so much if they thought they were getting decent value for their money (didn't see so much government waste)? Or are they really short sighted enough so that they're willing to let large chunks of society collapse to reduce their own personal taxes a little?
Disclaimer: I am a US citizen.
Actually, in the situation where you have a little tiny company going up against a really huge one (and the really tiny company has a reasonable sounding case), then I would think that getting a jury might be more preferable, since they might be more swayable by emotion than an apathetic judge.
"Inconvenienced" includes those larger radio stations who might think that you are taking away listeners from them (especially if they're feeling a little defensive about the quality of their programming).
You mean the toilet seats have to be capable of repeatedly launching payloads into space? Doesn't that make the LEO really nasty?
You're referring to cleverness & sophistication? :)
(Ow, the flames!)
I always wondered if it were possible to share people's browser cache contents via P2P technology (with exceptions for the secure documents, of course).
I guess the big problem is still with the indexing.
One of the old stories at Caltech in Pasadena, CA was about how they made a two-story tall acetylene orange launcher (since oranges from the trees on campus were more plentiful than potatoes).
Somebody went over to a local community college (a mile or so away from the Caltech campus), and drew a big X on the ground. Every day at about the same time, an orange would fall out of the sky and hit (approximately) the X.
The students at the community college eventually figured out what was going on when they caught a Techer with a walkie-talkie giving the shooters reports.
I use one of those huge rubber exercise therapy balls for a chair.
:) for visitors to our cubicle farm...
It keeps me moving around, makes me stay awake even if I'm short on sleep (if I don't, I end up on the floor), is really easy to shift into a situp position or for stretching my back for a few seconds, and makes for a good laugh (at me, not with me
The main disadvantage is that I can't really wear shorts sitting on this thing, since my exposed skin sticks to the rubber...
It sure is hard to remember those pesky passphrases, especially under the pressure of government interrogation. Say, did your government ever arrest the Minister of Information (or whatever the correct title was) for that encrypted e-mail message he was sent containing evidence of a crime?
Actually, I would see that translation as an indication that you are the type of person who will twist anything that a media person says into an indication of bias.
Conservative code for wasting money on poor people
Conservative code for "trickle-down" economics
I'd agree with you that most government programs are a waste of money, but not because they're giving money to poor people - but because they're wasting money that they're supposed to be giving to poor people.
I would also agree that just giving money to poor people is probably a bad way of distributing that money. But that money _should_ be spent _for_ the poor people in such a way to help them bootstrap themselves out of poverty, perhaps through education/training, and/or perhaps through arranging that they can become hired for a decent job.
Helping business isn't necessarily a bad idea - if those efforts are directed at real small businesses, which collectively contribute a helluva lot more "oomph" to the economy than the multinationals, and help people more directly near the poor end of society. Most of the proposals I see out of the Republicans involve giving lots of money to people who are already well-off though. (OTOH, I see a complete lack of proposals from the Democrats, with only lip service for poor people.)
I like to think of this as "trickle-up" economics, where everybody in society gets a chance (but not a guarantee) to make it to a higher standard of living, unlike giving lots of money to the rich, allowing them to sock even more money away & hoping that enough crumbs reach society's floor for a few poor bastards to claw their way out of despair (and to keep the bulk of the population too busy struggling for survival to bug the people in power).
You don't get a whole lot of support from this group, though.
No you're not. The copyright owners haven't lost anything that they already had. They've only lost a "chance" to get money, a chance which exists _only_ because of legislation, not because of any true concept of providing a good or service. In a true free market, they would've never gotten that extra money in the first place. Any normal business owner which complained about "losing" money because everybody wasn't giving them money after that business had performed a service for one person sometime in the past, would be laughed out of court.
No, there isn't (except in some people's minds).
Incorrect. If this were a true market, then content creators would be paid for whatever good they created or service rendered - _at the time that the good was provided or the service rendered_. There is no particular moral obligation for me (or anyone else) to pay them _every time_ that particular piece of content changes hands, since they have already been paid when they created the work & handed it over to the first buyer.
"Copyright", and other forms of intellectual "property", are highly artificial market concepts. We (society) allowed them to come into being in the hopes that they would encourage more content production for public usage, _not_ to enrich particular individuals or corporate entities. (I sincerely doubt that these concepts would have made it into the Constitution if the founders thought that intellectual "property" was only good for enriching individuals/corporate entities.)
If we (society) can see that that these concepts are not achieving the results that we wanted (producing large amounts of high-quality content for public usage), then we shouldn't be supporting these concepts.
Similarly, just because the law says that it's illegal doesn't mean it's wrong. Everybody has to make their own decisions about morality, even if that decision is to blindly follow what other people tell them is moral.
Most people are willing to accept that if you don't hurt somebody else by your actions, then there's nothing wrong with your actions.
Actually, quantum computers can break most of the commonly-used public-key algorithms (asymmetric), but it only helps out some on the commonly-used symmetric-key protocols (if they aren't breakable by anything except for brute force). So, 256-bit encryptions using Twofish/AES/Rijndael/3DES(although 3DES probably wants more bits) are still probably safe for the universal age even with quantum computers.
I don't care so much about roads, but for "equal opportunity" to mean _anything_, good schools need to be available for everyone - not just the people who can afford it. Without a widely-available societal mechanism to allow people to haul themselves out of the gutter, you're going to end up with a society that has a frozen class structure with massive inequity.
Nah, you'll BE a BSA agent shooting dirty pirates.
Eh, Clinton was supposedly real smart too, although he ended up thinking with his "other" brain instead of the one he should have been using.
I dunno about using TV tuner cards, which have been a real pain-in-the-butt when I had to deal with them, but I did find it easy to hook up my DV-camcorder to my PC through a Firewire (IEEE 1394) card & then essentially save the video stream from the camcorder directly onto my harddisk. The camcorder would also automatically send any analog video source I hooked up to its video inputs straight to the Firewire connection, real-time.
The camcorder provides the video stream in MJPEG format (which would probably need to be reencoded to something a little more standard, but that could be done at leisure and perhaps other machines).
If you've got a powerful-enough PC, it should be able to handle a couple of simultaneous Firewire streams. There's probably some way to do the video/audio->Firewire conversion w/o a camcorder too. There might also be video/audio->USB converters (as long as your USB connections have a high enough bandwidth to handle a decent quality stream).
What's interesting, is that I've heard that if you draw too much energy, the electric company will detect the drop in voltage & come out to see what's wrong (then have criminal charges brought against you).
That's not capitalism. Capitalism involves payment for goods and/or services. Patents (and other forms of intellectual "property") require state enforcement to create artificial scarcity.
You can argue about whether or not intellectual property is good for society, but you can't call it "pure" capitalism.
Is there actually enough space in the abdomen for internal organs with measurements like that?
Convenient. Just define all members of your enemy population as terrorists (or at least potential terrorists), then bomb away, without worrying about the innocents because they were being used by the "terrorists" as shields.
That's just 'cause the lasers weren't strong enough to vaporize anything that got in its way. Of course, if they were that strong, you wouldn't need the bombs...
No its not. That's just exploiting the legal system.
Exploiting the technology means actually putting it into a product or using it for a service.
No one institution, no matter how large, is going to be able to archive the sum of human endeavor. Just by lack of time/researchers/resources/shelf space/restoration/etc, they are going to have to make decisions about what works they are going to include/exclude in their archive.